My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (67 page)

“Goddamn,” I said to myself. “Mewes is hanging out with crack-heads that look like him now.” When that crack-head climbed into my car, I started crying.

Jason had spent the last two months smoking crack, he informed me. He’d lost thirty pounds. When I lose thirty pounds, people say “You look like you’ve lost some weight.” When Jason loses thirty pounds, photos of concentration camp survivors come to mind. It was the most unhealthy I’d ever seen him appear.

Immediately, I made plans to bring Jay back to LA with me where I’d put him back on the home-kick program. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the junket for
Strike Back
was planned for that week. Dimension put all of us up in the W Hotel in Westwood, where we were to spend two days doing round table and one-on-one interviews in support of the flick. Jason, the star of the film, sat in on a few of the interviews, during which most of the journalists commented on how thin he looked.

On the morning of the second day, I was pulled from an interview and shown into the junket office, where the Dimension publicist Gina, Scott, and Malcolm were waiting for me.

“Mewes had his sister Fed-Ex heroin to the hotel,” Scott said. “Malcolm found it.”

“Worse,” Gina added, “the hotel knows about it, and they’re saying if we don’t get him off the premises, they’re calling the police.”

We asked Jon Gordon, our Miramax/Dimension exec, to find a rehab we could deliver Jason to that night. He phoned Chris Moore, who hipped us to Promises, a rehab-to-the-stars in Malibu.

Jason was brought up to the room, and I confronted him, pissed beyond words, about the heroin delivery. Once again, he was given the choice of jail or help. He opted for the latter. I didn’t even say goodbye. I was too furious.

I didn’t see the boy for almost a month after that, during which time we continued post on
Strike Back
. The first time I’d lay eyes on him would be at the San Diego Comic-Con, where, after a month of good behavior, Promises had given him a day pass out of their facility to attend, providing he be accompanied by a sober-living companion — someone essentially paid to do what I’d done for all those years: babysit the boy. Jason looked great, and even better, he had his wits about him again. After the afternoon panel, we sat around the room with Malcolm, Jen and the sober-living companion, telling Malcolm-related stories and laughing it up. When the day was over, I hugged Jason, told him I loved him, and sent him back to Promises.

The week of the première, Mewes told me a story of coming back to the rehab after another day pass outing and being pulled into the main office.

“I didn’t do any drugs, I swear,” he’d said. “You can give me a urine, man. I’m clean!”

“This isn’t about that,” he was told by Jim, the program director who I’d grown to know quite well over the phone, when I’d call in three times weekly to check up on Jason’s progress. “There’s someone here who you know.”

“I don’t know anybody who needs rehab except me,” Mewes scoffed. “And even if I did, I don’t know anybody who could afford this place.”

“You know this person, and he’s very interested in keeping his stay here private. He doesn’t want you to tell anyone he’s here.”

Mewes says that the door to the room adjoining the office was opened to reveal our friend Ben Affleck sitting there, looking at him. Quoting
Chasing Amy
, Mewes said “Well look at this morose motherfucker right here...”

Ben’s stint in rehab made all the tabloids, and in most of the long-lens photos of him in Promises, Mewes could be spied in the background. One article misconstrued Jason’s presence as Mewes visiting Ben. For a few weeks, Ben’s stay was major news.

Until September 11th.

Strike Back
had been out for three weeks when Al Qaeda struck, and suddenly, it was a different world. I was still in Los Angeles at that point, and Mewes was just about to be released from Promises, his on-site program finished. The next step in his recovery was a halfway house on the ocean, where Jen and I visited him. The gorgeous locale prompted Schwalbach to utter “I’M an addict. Check ME in.”

By mid-October, I was ready to head back to Jersey with the family. With Jason’s help, we loaded out of the Toluca Lake rental. Mewes had decided to stay in Los Angeles, where he was planning to move in with some sober-living friends he’d met while at Promises. His life on track, I felt like I could leave the boy in the City of Angels, secure in the knowledge that he was finally on the straight and narrow. Ben was beating his demons, and now too, so was Mewes.

By Thanksgiving, only Ben would remain sober.

Me and My Shadow Pt. 7

Monday 10 April 2006 @ 10:53 a.m.

In the wake of 9/11, Jen and I opted to drive home to New Jersey from Los Angeles. And as if the post-terrorist attack vibe wasn’t foreign enough, we were coming home to a house we’d never lived in.

Before we’d left the motherland eleven months prior to shoot
Strike Back
, we’d purchased a new house in Rumson, a few miles down the road from the old Oceanport, flat-roofed abode. In our absence, a moving company had bagged and tagged all our stuff, shipping the contents of our old home into our fresh, new digs. We were now the proud owners of five acres and two floors in the most desirable part of central Jersey, situated around the block from Bruce Springsteen’s estate.

The whole family had gotten back to the east coast in October and spent most of the next month getting ourselves situated in the new house. By late November, we were ready to host our first Thanksgiving in Rumson. Mewes, who’d been out in Los Angeles, living in an apartment with some sober pals, called to say he wanted to come back to Jersey for the festivities as well, so, naturally, I invited him.

“You staying clean?” I asked him.

“Totally,” he’d responded.

“How long now?”

“I’m coming up on five months.”

“And isn’t life better now?”

“It is,” he said.

“If you stay clean, I’ve got a role for you in the next flick. A non-Jay role.”

“Awesome. I can’t wait.”

“I’m really fucking proud of you, man.”

“Thanks, Moves.”

I hadn’t seen Jason in two months when he showed up at my door the day before Thanksgiving with a new girlfriend, Amy. I gave the boy a big hug and then whisked him and his lady into a car with me and Mos, so we could head up to the Gizmo Recording Studio in Manhattan to lay down the
Strike Back
commentary track for the DVD. On the hour-long ride, Mewes chatted a bit, then nodded out a few times.

“You tired, man?” I asked.

“Yeah. I didn’t sleep last night,” he offered, summoning up that old chestnut of an excuse Mos and I had heard so often back in Jay’s drug dependency days. Quietly, I started to panic.

During the commentary track record, Mewes continued to catch a nod every few minutes, before excusing himself to hit the bathroom. Any shred of hope I’d been living in that the boy had stayed clean was now dying in despair.

On the ride home, Mewes asked if we could stop for cigarettes. When he popped into the convenience store, I turned in the driver’s seat to face Amy behind me and asked “He’s using again, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Amy confirmed, watching the convenience store to make sure Mewes wasn’t on his way back to the car. “He was at a college appearance in Colorado two months ago when someone offered him coke. It’s been downhill from there ever since.”

“Is it heroin or Oxys?”

“Mostly heroin. He scores it a few blocks from my apartment,” she confessed. “You’ve gotta talk to him about quitting. He’ll listen to you.”

“What charming, child-like naiveté,” I thought to myself, as Mewes returned with his smokes. Nothing else was said on the subject for the remainder of the ride home.

The Thanksgiving meal was prepared by Byron and Gail, and gobbled up by Jen, Harley, my parents, our friend Bob Hawk, Judy, Amy, Jason and me. When the dinner was over, Mewes and Amy retired downstairs to the rec room/basement. My then-two-year-old daughter Harley, who’d long harbored a crush on Mewes, solicited Jason time and again to play with her in her room, but Mewes repeatedly gave the kid the kind-yet-distinct brush-off, insisting that he’d hang out with her later. Harley lurked by the basement door for most of the day, waiting for the play date that would never come. Jen tried to explain to the toddler that Jay was just tired, but the wife really suspected it wasn’t exhaustion that was making Mewes inaccessible.

“He’s using again, isn’t he?” Jen asked.

“His girlfriend said he is. I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”

“I don’t even care any more. I’ve put up with his shit for years because you care about him, but now he’s breaking Harley’s heart, and I’m not gonna stand for that. I want him out of here.”

I called Mewes upstairs and went outside with him to smoke and talk.

“You’re using again,” I said to him.

“No, man. I’m just tired.”

“And now you’re lying again. But worse than lying, you’re ignoring the kid — the kid that you love. And you’re ignoring her because you’re high.”

Mewes quietly smoked, saying nothing.

“You brought drugs into my house, didn’t you?”

“I’m stopping, I swear. It was stupid, I know. But I’m quitting.”

“You can’t stay here, man. You lied to me and told me you were coming up on five months clean. You made it, what — like three months, really?”

“Ben said he’d pay for me to go back to Promises.”

“That’s fine. But until you get clean again, you can’t stay here. You’re gonna have to go stay with your sister while you’re in Jersey. I’ll drive you and your girlfriend over now.”

Rather than fight the decision, Mewes simply said “Alright.”

I dropped him off at his mom’s old house in Keansburg. It was the last time I’d see him for two months.

Around December, I had to go to Los Angeles to receive the People for the American Way’s Defender of Democracy Award. The ultra-liberal organization (headed by
All in the Family
creator Norman Lear) cited
Dogma
as the film that earned me the prize, which I was to be presented with at the same ceremony in which the
South Park
guys, Kim Pierce (the director of
Boys Don’t Cry
), and the Dixie Chicks (who’d taken a world of shit for anti-Bush comments in the wake of 9/11) were also being recognized. Byron, Gail, Harley, the wife and I flew out to California and checked in to the W Hotel in Westwood.

The morning after the PFAW Awards Ceremony, we were enjoying a family breakfast downstairs in the hotel restaurant when a discussion about our time in LA sparked a massive change in all of our lives. We’d spent almost a full year in California while making
Strike Back
, and my rationale was that if you spend a full year anywhere short of prison or Calcutta, it takes on the aspects of home. With the Jersey winter approaching, we embarked on an exploratory conversation about snow-birding it: moving back to LA for six months where I’d spend the time writing
Jersey Girl
, and the rest of the family could escape the impending freezing east coast temperatures. The idea snowballed, and soon, we were calling the owners of the Toluca Lake house we’d rented the year before.

When we got back to Jersey, I’d phoned Ben to see whether or not he’d wound up sponsoring Jason’s trip back to Promises. He said he had, but Mewes made it only four days into the program before checking himself out. We commiserated over Jason’s condition for a while before I announced that I was moving back to LA for the winter, to finish the
Jersey Girl
script.

“Where you gonna live?” Ben asked.

“We’re gonna rent that Toluca Lake house again.”

“Why don’t you buy my place instead? I just bought Drew Barrymore’s property on Coldwater, so I’m moving out of this joint. And you know your ol’ lady loooooves my house.”

I’d been to the house in question only five months earlier, for a fourth of July party, shortly before Ben checked himself into Promises. Nestled in the Hollywood Hills, Ben’s place was easily the most beautiful house I’d ever been in. A tri-level mansion with massive high ceilings and a pool on the top floor, it boasted an amazing view of what I felt was a mountain, but the locals called a hill. Jen had instantly fallen in love with it, and when Ben told us that — due to the joint’s proximity to the street which afforded all manner of paparazzi the freedom to shoot the shit out of him whenever he walked out of his front door — he was thinking about selling it, she had turned to me and said “I want this house.” We’d spoken with Ben at great lengths about taking the joint off his hands, but after the rehab stint, the topic never really came up again... until that moment.

“I just bought a house in Jersey, so I can’t buy your place until I get paid for turning in the
Jersey Girl
script,” I told my multi-millionaire friend.

“So then just rent the house instead,” he countered. “I’ll charge you the same monthly that the Toluca Lake people were gonna hit you up for, but go one better: all the money you pay in rent I’ll knock off the purchase price of the house when you’re ready to buy it.”

It was, to say the least, the biggest steal since the US had purchased the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans for some pelts and beads. Thanks to Ben’s largess, Jen’s dream of not just moving back to California, but moving back to California and living in that mansion became a reality. We put the Rumson house we’d purchased a year earlier and had only lived in for a total of three months on the market and, in January of 2002, headed west for good.

We’d been in the house for about a day when Jason showed up. He looked a lot worse for wear, but he seemed chipper, taking me through our new house and showing me where he’d slept or banged girls when he’d stayed with Ben a few times, pre- and post-Promises. I inquired about his most recent and brief visit to that same rehab, and he said it was a dumb move on his part, and that Ben was generously offering to send him to a different rehab. He talked about the possibility of moving into the house with us if he cleaned up, and I said with all the space we had, I’d happily give him a room, if he could get his life back on track.